


Time Can't Destroy

by drosophilase



Category: Glee RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-25
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:36:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drosophilase/pseuds/drosophilase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe there are infinite universes, maybe there’s only this one. Maybe we live many lives, or maybe this is the only chance we have. Maybe it can’t be proven that souls exist, but just maybe they do, all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Can't Destroy

Maybe there are infinite universes, maybe there’s only this one. Maybe we live many lives, or maybe this is the only chance we have. Maybe it can’t be proven that souls exist, but just maybe they do, all the same.

 

The Soulmaker didn’t know that’s what she was doing, at first— molding shapes, carving being, breathing life. On a whim between her usual work shaping moons and shooting stars, she took little leftover bits of this and tendrils of that and made  _souls_.  Each one she formed was unique but all were about the same size, half as big as her palm, and all of them thrumming with their own source of something different than her own magic, but still magic in it’s own right.

She wasn’t sure what to do with them, funny and strange as her creations were.  Each time she made one she put it with the others in a box, their rhythmic rattling and quiet clicking of their own volition only making her more and more curious.

It was when they started disappearing out her always-open window, slipping one at a time into the In-Between, that she knew without a doubt that they were something special.  And so she put away her intricate carvings on planet rings and comet tails and picked up her smallest tools instead.

Every soul she makes around a magical core, whatever she has on hand at the time.  The first time she managed to get quite a lot of stardust to make four souls with the same core, she was equal parts delighted and awed.  They didn’t just rattle in the box, no, these souls grouped together, warm to the touch, their magic multiplying the nearer they were.  Kin souls, the Soulmaker called them, watching the way they grew stronger over time, weakening as they went back out into the In-Between, one by one until the last one left, too, shriveled a little like it forgot how to be alone.  The Soulmaker threw a pinch of stardust out the window after them, saying a prayer that they would find each other again.

She makes souls for ages, eons, sometimes only two or three before she has to rest, sometimes up to fifteen.  There’s no rush, no number she has to complete, only the soul in her hand, layered in magic and scratched with runes, perfect in its particularity.

She makes kin souls whenever she can, her heart warming just as they do when they react to being near, and always adding a line to her prayers that one day they’ll meet again.  The ones most sacred and special to her, though, are the mates.

Every so often, maybe once in a century, she’ll find a deposit of malleable magic so powerful she can only scrape enough for just two souls.  There’s a ritual to mates, to shaping the two cores identically, to keeping them within an arm’s breadth of each other at all times to keep their magic at its peak, to keeping the thinnest strand of infinitely flexible chord threading them together.

And even as precious and unpredictable as mates are, there are still some that stand out among the rest.

It’s not the first pair of mates she makes and hopefully it won’t be the last, but finding a vein of gold magick ore was so rare that she spends over five working periods (and four rests between) on the pair. 

Mates are just uncommon enough that there’s a lot she still hasn’t tried, still so many unexplored ways to link them together in more than just their identical cores.  These mates— C and D, she calls them affectionately, the first symbols of the rune phrases she bases their makeup upon— are already the strongest she’s ever bonded just for their golden core, and it makes her brave.

She shapes C first, carefully protecting the core steadily pulsing with lifesource until only when placed directly next to D can she see it glow.  She carves out places of want, cutting deep at times, filling in with the precious grains of slick black sediment and shimmering silver gas and the faintest trickle of her matron ancestor’s magic, saved in a vial.

The soul, C, almost looks scarred, sitting pitted and armored next to the bare core of its mate— but then the magic intensifies and the Soulmaker can see the glowing lifesource moving, reaching out to bridge the tiniest gap between them, and she knows all will be well.

Where C is lacking, she gives D excess, runes carved in raised relief instead of deep cuts and only the barest layer covering the core, glow steady and bright even as she molds.

Something draws her back each time she rises from rest, the irresistible lure keeping her from calling them complete and letting C and D go, just yet.  There’s something about them that captivates her— perhaps the way the cores are so strong, similar in their drive to make themselves known but different in how they choose to show it.  Or maybe it’s the give and take, the way their magic increases a hundredfold when they’re touching, the way any other soul in C’s perimeter can dim the glow (she learned the hard way) but one nudge from D can bring it right back.  The gold magick core, her own craftsmanship— no matter the cause,  _something_  gives her deep contentment and the sense that all is right with the universe now that these two souls are created.  At least, for now.

The Soulmaker does let go, though, as she must, for the true test of her work is when the souls are put against the rest of the universe— the In-Between and whatever worlds lie beyond that the Soulmaker has never seen.  She can’t resist leaving just a little bit of her magic there in the bond between them, ensuring that it will never break no matter how the universe tugs upon it.

Instead of waiting for happenstance to pick them up she tempts fate, whisking them out of the window in her bare hands.   _Change for No One, Don’t Hesitate,_ she speaks in the tongue of the gods, watching the mates until the last shimmer of gold lifesource fades into the light of the In-Between.

She turns back to her supplies, reserves fit to bursting with the days she’s been neglecting her regular work, but she decides to rest instead, to try and forget how C and D had felt in her hands.  But she’s done all she could possibly do for the fated mates— their destiny is up to the universe now.


End file.
